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Ashwini Vasanthakumar, Privatising Border Control, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Volume 38, Issue 3, Autumn 2018, Pages 411–429, https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqy015
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Abstract
Liberal democracies increasingly rely on private actors, from private security corporations to civilian gatekeepers, to control their borders. Privatisation in this context, as in others, attracts criticism for its attendant abuses and inefficiencies. For the most part, these criticisms focus on the consequences of privatisation, which in principle can be remedied through better institutional design and practice. Recently, scholars have advanced intrinsic arguments against privatisation. These arguments proceed as follows: (i) they identify some goods as public goods that the state must provide; and (ii) they specify what public provision consists in, such that prominent forms of privatisation are precluded. In this article, I consider whether these intrinsic arguments apply to border control. Drawing on resources from within intrinsic accounts, however, I argue that non-public actors and reasons may be useful for realising public goods, especially in those cases that implicate the interests of outsiders, such as border control.
